Indefensible rules that benefit no one

DRIVING to the tup sales at Kelso recently I was struck how much harvest was still to gather in the Borders. And with the weather since being ‘catchy’ at best, I hope this has allowed some decent progress with harvest in what is already a late and difficult season for growers.

I know some of our fields at home are looking pretty delicate after nearly three inches of rain in September. We still have a huge amount of grass but how long we will be able to keep cows out is debatable.

So, there is a real urgency at the moment to get sheds prepared for winter, especially at Knockenjig where we are on the final push to get new cattle accommodation built and kitted out.

With the purchase of more ground, we decided last year to significantly increase our sucklers. Not very fashionable I know, but I’ve found over the years that if the consensus of opinion is to fly west, I have tended to fly east and in the main it has worked!

The economics of beef production from sucklers has always been challenging and that will never change. Keeping a seven or eight hundred kilo animal to produce one offspring per year will never be able to compete with more intensively reared chicken or pig meat, but nor should it!

So if you are going to be in this business, our view is that you need to have scale and be super-efficient to try to get the margins to stack up. So we have increased our numbers by more than 200 with a lot of spring calving heifers in the pipeline as well.

I would have thought that this kind of expansion would be exactly what ScotGov would be trying to encourage. Although Fergus Ewing is on the record on numerous occasions supporting productive agriculture, it seems that some of the schemes he has inherited from his predecessor may currently not quite fulfil his wishes or aspirations in this regard.

One of these is the much maligned Beef Efficiency Scheme. We have joined this scheme; indeed, I publicly backed it when Jim McLaren and others were getting criticised for trying to promote it.

I would have thought that such a scheme would be tailor made for expanding businesses like ours, but it appears not! Having bought more than 100 cows with calves at foot last year to start this stocking up process, it now appears they are ineligible for this wonderful scheme.

I checked the eligibility criteria, including ownership, proof they were sucklers etc only to be told that SGRIPD was terribly sorry the published rules weren’t accurate and they don’t qualify.

Now, of course, if I had 80% less cows than last year then they would qualify!! Have you ever heard anything so bloody stupid in your life…actually don’t answer that!!??

And when challenged about these daft scheme rules, the SGRPID reply was pretty standard, namely it’s these dreadful EU rules that won’t allow it.

A scheme that has ‘efficiency’ in its title; designed to try to produce more beef for Scottish processors; to help make suckler herds more profitable; to allow more added value to be created for the Scottish economy as a whole; funded partly by Scottish tax payers – yet officials are comfortable paying folk that put animals off but not those that are expanding or new entrants who are the future of the sector.

In fact, the official SGRPID line in a reply to me from a month ago reads, and I quote: “The scheme (BES) have confirmed that the rules on the reference year and animals included in the scheme details were subject to approval by the European Commission, and there are no plans at present to apply for changes to those rules”.

So it would seem unless we get political intervention to change these daft rules at a time where it seems schemes even as sacred as LFASS appear to be under threat, senior officials currently have no plans to do anything about this. Apparently they are happy to continue to pay people (presumably for the next three years), for having less cows and buying a new pair of slippers, rather than encourage the expansion of the Scotch Beef brand by producing more suckled calves to help fulfil the demand for this quality product – well at least I think it’s a quality product!!

In a sense, this madness serves to exemplify a lot of what has gone wrong with agriculture policy in Scotland over recent times.

For years, the focus of SGRPID has not been on the ‘outcomes’ of policy, but on delivery mechanisms and a total fixation on consensus before anything could happen.

In other words, the previous administration believed if they handed out sweeties to this group and that group and no-one got what they really wanted, but equally weren’t terribly upset, that was regarded as a successful policy.

It blundered on, instead of standing back and asking what is best for Scotland; its economy; taxpayers funding these schemes; and importantly the poor sods (ie us) that have to operate our businesses within the constraints imposed by their unintelligible, illogical and indefensible rules that benefit no one.

Now a new Cabinet Secretary with some fresh thinking and an emphasis on economic development, and with the chance to do something radical post Brexit, we need to start thinking seriously about what kind of agriculture Scotland really wants and needs.

For now, forget about the ‘how’ and ‘the delivery’ and think about the ‘what’ – what do we want? That way, we may not end up with schemes like the BES which, as currently drawn up, wouldn’t know efficiency if it saw it.

So come on, for a country whose citizens invented telephones, television, microwaves, bicycles, flushing toilets, penicillin, marmalade, golf and football (to name but a few), we can surely do better than this?